Ableton Forum

Hi, I just received a Melbourne Instruments Roto Control. I wanted it mostly to control Ableton synths and devices. I’m trying to map Drift parameters and I found some drop down menus don’t seem to be available for mapping. It’s a little frustrating, because I can control 90% of the synth, but I have to use the mouse and the screen to set modulation sources for instance. I would like to know if there’s some kind of workaround for this. I was ready to map lots of devices and instruments but this issue concerns me.
So, any ideas about this? Thanks in advance.

M4L, where Drift is a proper class, would let you patch a device that access and controls the mod matrix. You would then map this device to your controller.

[edit] sorry I'm wrong, these properties are only observable so that won't work I'm afraid.

Ohh, that would have been great… It’s a shame, because I’ve just mapped some UAD and Soundtoys plugins and they have every parameter available for mapping.
Anyway, many thanks for your help Jur.

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... s-txt-file

PluginAutoPopulateThreshold

Line to add to Options.txt file: -_PluginAutoPopulateThreshold=64

Auto-populates the plug-in parameter list if a plug-in has a number of less or equal than X parameters.

Default = 64
Min = 1
Max = 128

128 will always populate the list with max. 128 parameters, regardless of how many parameters the plug-in has.

nightscope wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 25, 2026 12:25 am

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... s-txt-file
PluginAutoPopulateThreshold

But this is for 3rd party plugins, not Live devices.

You may want to try “control surface studio” from remotify. You can try the trial to see if it gives you access to the params you want. FIY.. uses user remote scripts so until Ableton adds that to push SA it’s no good there. Otherwise, it’s pretty powerful stuff.

[jur] wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 24, 2026 8:42 am

M4L, where Drift is a proper class, would let you patch a device that access and controls the mod matrix. You would then map this device to your controller.

[edit] sorry I'm wrong, these properties are only observable so that won't work I'm afraid.

You were right, it can work. The properties can be read, set and observed* (apart from the list of possible sources and targets, but these can't be changed anyway).
I built a proof-of-concept Max for Live device and can MIDI-map modulation sources and targets. So it's doable for all 15 parameters.

*) Maybe you were confused because the documentation now only mentions Observe. The absence of the 'Read-only' label implicitly indicates that a parameter can be set/written. Something that is only clear once you've noticed the Read-only labels for other parameters (and they are not always there or nearby) and understand how the new labeling works. I find it very confusing. The old way of mentioning Get, Set, and Observe per parameter was, in my opinion, better.

Purpletea wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 30, 2026 12:41 am

*) Maybe you were confused because the documentation now only mentions Observe. The absence of the 'Read-only' label implicitly indicates that a parameter can be set/written. Something that is only clear once you've noticed the Read-only labels for other parameters (and they are not always there or nearby) and understand how the new labeling works. I find it very confusing. The old way of mentioning Get, Set, and Observe per parameter was, in my opinion, better.

On point, that's definitely what happened, I wasn't aware of that change in the documentation.

I made a Max for Live device that enables mapping of the unmappable menus.
https://maxforlive.com//library/device.php?id=14481